The Stream of Life (8 page)

Is it possible that at the instant I die I will force life by trying to live longer than I can? But I am today.

I'm well aware that I'm writing you in disorder. But that's how I live. I work only with losts and founds.

But writing is frustrating for me: in writing, I deal with the impossible. With the enigma of nature. And of God. Anyone who doesn't know what God is will never be able to know. In the past, people discovered God. Now it's something that's just known.

Does my life have no plot? I'm unexpectedly fragmentary. I'm little by little. My story is to live. And I'm not afraid of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling. My lame angel who becomes disdainful, my angel who has fallen from Heaven to Hell where he lives relishing evil.

This isn't a story because I don't know stories as such, but only know how to keep on speaking and doing: it's a story of instants that flash by, like fugitive tracks seen from a train window.

This afternoon we will meet. And I won't say a word about what I'm writing you and that it contains what I am and that I'm giving it to you as a gift even if you don't read it. You'll never read what I write. And when I've recorded my secret of being—I'll throw it away, as though into the sea. I'm writing you because you're not accepting what I am. When I destroy my recordings of instants, will I return to my nothingness from which I took an everything? I have to pay the price. The price of someone who has a past that only renews itself with passion in the strange present. When I think of what I've already lived, it seems to me that I was leaving my bodies all along the way.

It's almost five o'clock in the morning. And the fainting light of dawn, cold, bluish steel and with the tart bitterness of the day being born of the shadows. And emerging bright, on the surface of time, I, too, I'm being born out of the darkness, I, impersonal, who am
it.

I'm going to tell you something. I don't know how to paint any better or worse than I do. I paint a
this.
And I write with
this—
it's all I can do. Restlessly. The liters of blood that circulate in my veins. The muscles contracting and relaxing. The aura of the body in full moon. Parambolic—whatever that word means. Parambolic that I am. I can't sum myself up because it's impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I'm a chair and two apples. And I don't add up.

I'm in happy love once again. What you are I quickly breath in, inhaling your aura of wonder before it vanishes into the vaporized air. Is my fresh will to live myself and to live you the very structure of life? The nature of beings and things—is it God? Perhaps, then, if I demand a lot of nature, will I stop dying? Can I violate death and open a crack in it for life?

I cut off the pain of what I'm writing you and I offer you my restless happiness.

And in this now-instant I see white statues scattered in the perspective of long, far-off distances—evermore distant in the desert where I lose myself with an empty gaze, I myself a statue to be seen from a distance, I who am always losing myself, I'm taking advantage of what exists. Silent, ethereal, in my great dream. Since I understand nothing—I therefore cling to a vacillating, mobile reality. I attain the real through my dreams. I invent you, reality. And I hear you like remote bells deafly submerged in the water chiming tremolos. Am I in the core of death? And is this the reason I'm alive? The sensitive core. And the
it
vibrates me. I'm alive. Like a wound, a flower in the flesh, the path of aching blood is open within me. With the direct and for that very reason innocent eroticism of the Indians of the Holy Lake. I, exposed to the inclemencies, I, an inscription opened on the back of a stone, within the long chronological spaces bequeathed by prehistorical man. The hot wind of great millennial expanses blows and ruffles my surface.

Today I used red ocre, yellow ocre, black, and a little white. I feel that I'm in the proximity of springs, lakes and waterfalls, all with abundant fresh water for my thirst. And I, savage finally and finally free of the dry days of today: I trot back and forth without boundaries. I carry out solar cults on the slopes of high mountains. But I'm taboo to myself, untouchable because forbidden. Am I the hero who carries the fiery torch in an eternal race?

Oh, Force of all that Exists, help me, you whom they call God. Why is it that the terrible horror calls to me? what do I want with my horror? because my demon is an assassin and doesn't fear punishment: but the crime is more important than the punishment. I make myself come alive in my happy instinct for destruction.

Try to understand what I paint and what I'm now writing. I'm going to explain: in my painting, as in my writing, I try to see strictly within the moment when I see— and not to see through the memory of having seen in an instant now past. The instant is that. The instant is of an imminence that takes my breath away. The instant is in itself imminent. At the same time that I live it, I hurl myself into its passage to another instant.

That's how I saw the church portal I painted. You questioned the excess symmetry. Let me explain: symmetry was the most successful thing I did. I've lost my fear of symmetry, after the disorder of inspiration. You need either experience or courage to reevaluate symmetry, when you can easily imitate the falsely asymmetrical, one of the most common originalities. My symmetry in the church portals is concentrated, successful, but not dogmatic. It's suffused with the hope that two asymmetries will meet in symmetry, that as a third solution: synthesis. Hence, perhaps, the portals' ravaged look, their delicacy of a thing lived and then relived, and not the kind of inconsequential bravado of those who do not know. No, what's there isn't exactly tranquillity. There's a hard fight for the thing that, despite being corroded, keeps itself intact. And in the densest colors there's the lividity of something that though twisted is intact. My crosses are twisted by centuries of mortification. Are the portals a prefiguration of altars? Their silence. Their greenish hue takes on a tone of what may lie between life and death, an intensity of sunset.

And in the quiet colors there's old bronze and steel —and everything amplified by a silence of things lost and found in the dirt of the steep road. I sense a long, dusty road until I arrive at the painting's resting place. Even if the portais do not open. Or is the portal already the church, and when you're in front of it you've already arrived?

I struggle not to go beyond the portal. They are walls of a Christ who is absent, but the walls are there and are touchable: for hands also see.

I create the material before painting it, and wood becomes as indispensable to my painting as it would be to a sculptor. And the created material is religious: it has the weight of convent beams. Compact, closed like a locked door. But gaps have been torn in the portal, ripped out by fingernails. And it's through those open breaches that one can see what's inside a synthesis, inside Utopian symmetry. Coagulated color, violence, martyrdom are the beams that hold up the silence of a religious symmetry.

But now I'm interested in the mystery of mirrors. I search for a way to paint one or speak of it with the word. But what is a mirror? The word mirror doesn't exist, only mirrors exist, since a single one is an infinity of mirrors. Could there be a mirror mine somewhere in the world? A mirror isn't made, it's born. Not many are needed for the sparkling and somnambulant mine: two are enough, and one will reflect the reflection of what the other has reflected, in a trembling that in an intense and mute, insistent, telegraphic message transmits liquidity into which one can plunge one's fascinated hand and bring it back out dripping with reflections of that hard water that is the mirror. Like a fortuneteller's crystal ball, it drags me into the void which, for the fortuneteller, is a field of meditation, and in me is the field of silences upon silences. And I can scarcely talk, from so much silence unfolded into others.

A mirror? That crystalized empty space that has inside it space to move forever forward without stopping: because the mirror is the deepest space that exists. And it's a magical thing: anyone who has a broken fragment could go with it into the desert to meditate. It's extraordinary to see oneself. Like a cat with its fur standing on end, my hair stands on end in the face of myself. I would also come back empty-handed from the desert, illuminated and translucid, and with the same vibrant silence of a mirror.

Its shape isn't important: no shape succeeds in circumscribing and altering it. A mirror is light. The tiniest piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.

Take away its frame or its contours and it spreads, as water pours.

What is a mirror? It's the only invented material that is natural. Anyone who looks into a mirror, who succeeds in seeing it without seeing himself, who understands that its depth consists of its being empty, who walks inside its transparent space without leaving in it a trace of his own image—that someone has then perceived its mystery as thing. That's why you have to surprise it when its alone, when its hung in an empty room, without forgetting that in front of it the most fragile needle could transform it into the simple image of a needle, so sensitive is the mirror in its quality of very light reflection, only image and not the substance. The body of the thing.

In painting it, I needed all my own delicacy not to cross it with my image, since in the mirror in which I see myself I already am, only an empty mirror is a living mirror. Only a very delicate person can walk into the empty room where there's an empty mirror, and with such grace, with such absence of self, that the image does not register. As a reward, that delicate person will then have penetrated into one of the inviolable secrets of things: he saw the mirror as it is.

And he discovered the enormous, frozen spaces in himself, interrupted only by a block of ice here or there. A mirror is cold and ice. But there's a succession of darknesses within it—to perceive this is a very rare instant—and its necessary to keep vigil day and night, fasting from your very self, to be able to surprise and capture the succession of darknesses that are there within it. With colors of black and white, I've recaptured on canvas its tremulous luminosity. With the same black and white, I also recapture, in a cold shiver, one of its most difficult truths: its frozen, colorless silence. You have to understand a mirror's violent absence of color to be able to recreate it, just as if one were to recreate water's violent absence of taste.

No, I haven't described a mirror—I've been one. And the words are themselves, with no discursive tone.

I must interrupt here to say that "X" is what exists within me. "X"—I bathe myself in that this. It's unpronounceable. Everything I don't know is in "X." Death? death is "X". But a lot of life, too, for life is unprounounceable. "X" that trembles within me, and I fear its diapason: it vibrates like a cello string, a tense chord that, when struck, emits pure electricity, without melody. The unpronounceable instant. It would take a different sensibility to comprehend "X."

I hope you live "X" so you can experience the kind of creative drowsiness that slumbers through the veins. "X" is neither good nor bad. It always independs. But it only happens for what has body. Although immaterial, it needs our body and the body of the thing. There are objects which are that total mystery of "X." Like what vibrates mutely. The instants are shattered fragments of "X." popping in endless sequence. The excess of me starts to hurt and when I'm excessive I have to give of myself, like the milk that, if it doesn't flow, engorges the breast. I relieve myself of the pressure and return to normal size. Exact elasticity. Elasticity of a supple panther.

A black panther caged. Once I gazed deeply into a panthers eyes and she gazed deeply into mine. We transmuted ourselves. That fear. I left there totally dazed inside, the restless "X." Everything had taken place behind thought. I long for the terror that the exchange of gazes with the black panther gave me. I know how to make terror.

Is the "X" the breath of the
it?
is it its irradiating, cold breathing? Is "X" a word? The word only refers to a thing and that is something I can never reach. Each one of us is a symbol dealing with symbols—everything is a point of mere reference to the real. We seek desperately to find a proper identity and the identity of the real. And if we understand each other through the symbol it's because we have the same symbols and the same experience of the thing itself: but reality has no synonyms.

I'm speaking to you in the abstract and I ask myself: "am I an
aria cantabile?"
No, one cannot sing what I'm writing you. Why don't I chose a theme that one could easily discover? but no: I sidle along the wall, I do sleight-of- hand tricks with the melody that is discovered, I walk in the shadow, in that place where so many things happen. Sometimes I trickle down the wall, in a place where the sun never beats. My ripening of a theme would already be an
aria cantabile—
another person who makes other music—the music of the ripening of my quartet. This is before the ripening. The melody would be the fact. But what fact has a night passed entirely on a back road where no one is and all the while we sleep without knowing anything? Where is the fact? My story is one of a tranquil darkness, of roots dormant in their strength, of scent without perfume. And in none of this does the abstract exist. It's the figurative of the unnameable. Flesh almost doesn't exist in this quartet of mine. It's a shame that the word "nerves" is linked to painful vibrations, otherwise it would be a quartet of nerves. Dark chords which, when played, do not speak of "other things," they don't change the subject—they are, in and of themselves, giving themselves over just as they are, without fancy or lie.

I know that after you read me it's hard to reproduce my music by ear, its not possible to sing it without having it memorized. And how do you memorize a thing that has no story?

But you'll remember something else that also itself occurred in the shadows. You'll have shared in that first mute existence, and, as in a tranquil dream on a tranquil night, you'll have run with the resin down the tree trunk. Then you'll say, "I dreamed nothing." Can that be enough? Yes, it can. And above all there is in this primary existence a lack of error, a shade of emotion from someone who could lie but who doesn't. Is that enough? It is enough, yes.