No, all this is not happening in real facts but rather in the domain of... of an art? Yes, of an artifice through which there arises a very delicate reality that comes to exist within me: that transfiguration has happened to me.
But the other side, from which I barely escaped, has become sacred, and to no one shall I tell my secret. It seems to me that on the other side I made a vow in a dream, a blood pact. No one will know anything about it: what I know is so volatile and almost nonexistent that it remains between myself and me.
Am I one of the weak ones? a weakling who was caught up in the ceaseless, crazy rhythm? If I were solid and strong wouldn't I at least have heard the rhythm? I don't find answers: I am. This is all that comes to me from life. But what am I? The only answer is, I'm the what. Although sometimes I cry: "I don't want to be me anymore!!" But I affix myself to myself and inextricably a tessitura of life is formed.
Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it's painful but it's lived. Because now I speak to you in earnest: I'm not playing with words. I embody myself in voluptuous and unintelligible phrases that spiral outward beyond words. And a silence arises subtly from the clash of sentences.
Writing, then, is the way followed by someone who uses words like bait: a word fishing for what is not a word. When that non-word—the whatever's between the lines— bites the bait, something's been written. Once the between the lines has been hooked, you can throw the word away with relief. But there the analogy ends: the non- word, in biting the bait, incorporates it. What saves you, then, is to write absent-mindedly.
I don't want to have the terrible limitation of the person who lives only by what can be made to make sense. Not I, no: what I want is an invented truth.
What shall I tell you about? I shall tell you about the instants. I exceed my limits and only then do I exist and then in a feverish way. I'm very feverish . . . will I ever be able to stop living? God help me, I die so much. I follow the tortuous path of roots breaking through the earth, for passion is my talent, in the burning of a dry tree I twist in the flames. To the duration of my existence I give a hidden meaning which surpasses me. I'm a concomitant being: I unite in myself past, present, and future time, the time that throbs in the tick-tock of clocks.
To interpret and shape myself I need new signs and new articulations in forms which are found both on this side of my human history and on the other. I transfigure reality, and then another reality, dreamy and somnambulant, creates me in turn. And I, whole again, roll on the ground and as I roll I pick up leaves, I, anonymous creation of an anonymous reality justified only as long as my life lasts. And afterward? . . . afterward, all I have lived will amount to the experiences of a poor, superfluous being.
But as for now I'm in the center of something that shouts and surges forth. And it's subtle, like the most intangible reality. As for now, time is how long a thought lasts.
It's that pure, this contact with the invisible nucleus of reality.
I know what I'm doing here: I'm counting the instants that drip and are thick with blood.
I know what I'm doing here . . . I'm improvising. But what's wrong with that? I improvise in the same way they improvise in jazz, frenzied jazz, I improvise in front of the audience.
It's so curious to have exchanged paints for this strange thing that is the word. Words ... I move carefully among them, for they can turn menacing; I can have the freedom to write such as the following: "Pilgrims, merchants and shepherds led their caravans toward Tibet, and the roads were hard and primitive." With this sentence, I give birth to a scene, as in the flash of a camera.
What does this improvised jazz bespeak? It bespeaks arms entangled in legs and flames rising and I passive like a piece of flesh that's devoured by the sharp hooked beak of an eagle that stops its blind flight. I express to myself and to you my most secret desires and with the words achieve a confused, orgiastic beauty. I shiver with pleasure in the midst of the innovation of using words that form intense underbrush! I struggle to conquer more fully the freedom that I have of sensations and thoughts without any utilitarian meaning: I'm alone, I and my freedom. My freedom is of such proportions that it could scandalize a savage, but I know you aren't scandalized with the plenitude that I achieve and that is without any perceptible frontiers. This capacity of mine to live what is round and full—I surround myself with carnivorous plants and legendary creatures, all bathed in the coarse, awkward light of a mythical sex. I go ahead intuitively, and without looking for an idea: I'm organic. And I don't question myself about my motives. I immerse myself in the near pain of an intense happiness—and to adorn me leaves and branches are born from out of my hair.
I don't know what I'm writing about: I'm obscure even to myself. Initially I had only a lunar, lucid vision, and then I clasped that instant to myself before it died and perpetually dies. I transmit to you not a message of ideas but rather an instinctive voluptuousness of what is hidden in nature and that I sense. And this is a feast of words. I write in signs that are more gesture than voice. All this is what I used to paint, probing into the intimate nature of things. But now the time has come to stop painting in order for me to remake myself, I remake myself in these lines. I have a voice. Just as when I throw myself into the outline of my sketch, this is an exercise in life without planning. The world has no visible order, and I have only the order of my breathing. I let myself happen.
I'm in the great dreams of the night: because the now-instant is night. And I sing the passage of time . . . I'm still the queen of the Medes and the Persians and I am also my own slow evolution which thrusts itself out like a drawbridge into a future whose milky fogs I already breathe today. My aura is life mystery. I exceed myself by abdicating myself and then I am the world: I follow the voice of the world, I myself, suddenly, with a single voice.
The world ... a tangle of bristling telegraph wires. And the luminosity, albeit obscure: this I am before the world.
A dangerous balance, mine, the danger of my soul's death. Today's night looks at me with torpor, verdigris and enticement. I want inside this night which is longer than life, I want, inside this night, raw, bloody life full of saliva. I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself. But my essence is always hidden. I am implicit. And when I begin to make myself explicit I lose my moist intimacy. What color is the infinity of space? It's the color of air.
Us . . . facing the scandal of death.
Listen only superficially to what I say and from the lack of meaning will be born a meaning, as from me light, ethereal life is inexplicably born. The dense jungle of words wraps itself thickly around what I feel and live, and transforms everything I am into something of my own that remains beyond me. Nature is all-encompassing: it coils around me and is sexually alive, just that and nothing more: just alive. I too am savagely alive—and I lick my snout like the tiger after it has devoured the deer.
I write you in the very core of the instant. I unfold myself only in the present. I speak today—not yesterday or tomorrow but today—and in this very perishable instant.
My small, fenced-in freedom ties me to the freedom of the world-but what is a window other than air framed by a molding? I'm harshly alive. "I'm leaving," says death, without adding that its taking me along. And I tremble, gasping for air, at having to go with death. I am death. It comes within my very being—how can I say it? It's a sensual death. Like a dead woman I walk the fields in the tall grass, stalks of green light: I am Diana, the Huntress of gold, and I find only boneyards: I live in a stratum underlying feeling: I'm barely living.
But these high summer days of damnation blow over me the necessity of renunciation. I renounce having a meaning, and then sweet, painful exhaustion takes me over. Forms round and round intersect in the air. It's hot like summer. I navigate in my galley that defies the winds of an enchanted summer. Crushed leaves remind me of the ground of childhood. The green hand and the gold
en breasts . . . that is how I paint the mark of Satan. Those who fear us and our alchemy stripped witches and magicians seeking the secret sign that was almost always found even though it could be known only by a glance, since the sign was indescribable and unutterable even in the blackness of a Middle Age . . . Middle Ages, you are my dark underlying, and by the light of the bonfires the branded ones dance in circles, riding branches and leafy boughs which are the phallic symbol of fertility: even in the White Masses blood is used, and drunk.
Listen ... I let you be, so let me be in turn.
But "eternally" is a very hard word: it has a granite "t" in its middle. "Eternity": for everything that is had no beginning. My little head, so limited, bursts at thinking about something which has no beginning and no end—because the eternal is like that. Happily, this feeling lasts only a short time because I cannot bear for it to continue, and if it persisted it would drive me mad. But my head also bursts at imagining the opposite, something that had a beginning: but where would it begin? And something that was over: but what would happen after it was over? As you see, it's impossible for me to delve deeper into life and possess it, it's aerial, it's my light breathing. But I know full well what I want here: I want the unconcluded. I want the profound organic disorder that nonetheless triggers the intuiting of an underlying order. The great power of potentiality. These, my stammered sentences, are made the very moment they're being written and they crackle they're so new and still so green. They are the now. I want the experience of a lack of structure. Although my text is transversed from beginning to end by a fragile conductive line—what is it? the submersion into matter of the word? passion? An exuberant line, a breath warming the flow of syllables. Life barely eludes me, although I get the conviction that life is other and has a secret style all its own.
This text that I'm giving you is not to be looked at up close: it takes on its secret, previously invisible totality only when it is seen from a high-flying airplane. Then it's possible to discern the interplay of islands, see canals and lakes. Understand me: I'm writing you an onomatopoeia, a convulsion of language. I'm transmitting to you not a story but only words which live off of sound. Thus, I say to you:
"Exuberant trunk."
And I bathe in it. It's linked to the root which penetrates through us down into the earth. Everything I write you is tense. I use loose words that in themselves are free- flying darts—"savages, barbarians, ignoble decadents, marginal figures. " Does this say anything to you? It speaks to me.
But the most important word in the Portuguese language has but a single letter,"é," 'is'. It is.
I'm in its marrow.
I still am.
I'm in the soft, living center. Still.
It flickers and is elastic. Like the gait of a sleek black panther I once saw which paced softly, slowly, dangerously. But not caged—because I don't want it that way. As for the unforeseeable—the next sentence is unforeseeable for me. In the core where I am, in the core of the Is, I don't ask questions. Because when it is—it is. I'm limited only by my identity. I, an elastic entity separated from other bodies.
Truthfully, I still cannot completely discern the thread from the skein of what I'm writing you. I don't think I'll ever see it—but I welcome the darkness where the two eyes of that soft panther glow. The darkness is my cultural broth. The enchanted darkness. I go on speaking to you, risking disconnection: I'm subterraneously unattainable because of what I know.
I write you because I do not understand myself.
But I continue following after myself. Elastically. This forest where I survive in order to exist is so great a mystery. But now I think it's really going to happen. That is, I'm going to go in. I mean, into the mystery. I, myself mysterious, and inside the core where I move by swimming, protozoan-like. One day I childishly said: "I can do anything." It was the foresight that one day I would be able to let myself go and fall into the abandonment of all laws. Elastically. The profound happiness: secret ecstasy. I know how to invent a thought. I feel the tumult of newness. But I'm well aware that what I write is only a tone.
In this core I have the strange impression that I don't belong to the human race.
There are many things to say that I don't know how to say. The words aren't there. But I refuse to invent new ones: the ones that already exist should say what can be said and what is forbidden. And what is forbidden I can divine. If I have the strength. Behind the thought there are no words: it-itself is. My painting has no words: it stays there behind thought. In this territory of the it-itself, I'm pure crystalline ecstasy. It is itself. I am myself. You are yourself.
And I'm startled by my apparitions, by what is mythical, fantastic, and gigantic: life is supernatural. And I walk holding an open umbrella on a tightrope. I walk to the limit of my great dream. I see the fury of visceral impulses: tortured visceras guide me. I don't like what I've just written—but I'm forced to accept the whole passage because it happened to me. And I respect very much what I cause to happen to myself. My essence is unconscious of itself, and it's for that reason I blindly obey myself.
I'm being antimelodic. I delight in the difficult harmony of harsh contrasts. Where am I going? and the answer simply is: I'm going.
When I die I will then never have been born or have lived: death erases the traces of seafoam on the sand.
Now is an instant.
And now, already, is another one.
And another. My intent: to bring the future into the present. I move within my deepest instincts which carry themselves out blindly. I feel then that I'm close to fountains, lakes, and waterfalls, all of overflowing waters. And I'm free.
Hear me, hear my silence. What I speak is never what I speak but something else. When I say "overflowing waters" I'm talking about bodily strength within the waters of the world. Capture this something else of which I truly speak because I myself cannot. Read the energy that is there in my silence. Ah, I'm fearful of God and of His silence.
I am myself.
But there's also the mystery of the impersonal that is the "it": I have the impersonal within me and its not rotten and corruptible by the personal that sometimes drenches me: but I dry myself in the sun and I'm impersonal, made of a dry, germinating seed. My personal is humus on the earth and lives off what has rotted. My "it" is hard like a pebble.
The transcendent in me is the living, soft "if," and it has the thoughts an oyster has. Is it possible that the oyster, when its torn from its root, feels anxiety? It becomes uneasy in its eyeless life. I used to be in the habit of squeezing lemon juice on live oysters and seeing with horror and fascination how they would recoil. And I was eating the living it. The living it is God.
I'm going to stop for a while because I know that God is the world. He is what exists. Do I pray for what exists? It isn't dangerous to approach what exists. Deep prayer is a meditation on the void. It's the dry, electric contact with self, an impersonal self.
What I don't like is when they squeeze lemon on what's deepest in me and make me recoil. Are the facts of life the lemon on the oyster? Does the oyster sleep?
What is the primal element? soon there had to be two to create the secret, intimate motion from which milk pours forth.
I'm told that after a cat gives birth it eats its own placenta and for four days doesn't eat anything more. Only after that will it drink milk. Let me speak just about nursing. They talk of the milk letting down. What does that mean? It wouldn't do any good for me to explain because the explanation requires another explanation which would lead to another explanation and which would arrive again at the mystery. But I know about the it things of nursing children.
I'm breathing. In and out. In and out. How does the naked oyster breathe? If it breathes, I don't see it. Does what I don't see not exist? What moves me most is that what I don't see exists nonetheless. Because then I have at my feet a whole unknown world that fully exists brimming with rich saliva. The truth is somewhere: but it's useless to think about it. I won't discover i
t and yet I live off it.
What I'm writing you does not come softly, rising little by little to a climax, then to die softly afterward. No: what I write you is made of fire, eyes glowing like coals.
There's a full moon tonight. Through the window the moon covers my bed and leaves everything a milky blue- white. The moonlight is awkward. It stays on the left side of whoever comes in. Then I flee, my eyes closed. Because the full moon is of a light insomnia: it's torpid and sleepy like after making love. And I had decided that I was going to go to sleep so I could dream ... I was yearning for the novelty of dreams.
Then I dreamed something that I'm going to try to reproduce. It's about a film I was watching. In it there was a man who was imitating a movie actor. And everything this man did was in turn imitated by others and then others. Every move. And there were ads for a drink called Zerbino. The man would take a bottle of Zerbino and raise it to his mouth. Then everyone would take a bottle of Zerbino and raise it to their mouths. In the middle the man who was imitating a movie actor would say: "This film is an advertisement for Zerbino, and Zerbino really isn't any good." But that wasn't the end. The man took the bottle again and drank and drank. And all the others did the same ... it was awful. Zerbino was an institution stronger than man. The women at that time all looked like airline stewardesses. Airline stewardesses are dehydrated—you have to add enough water to their powder to make them into milk. It's a film about automatic people acutely and solemnly aware that they are automatic and that there's no escape. God is not automatic: for Him, every instant is. He is it.
But there are questions I asked as a child that were never answered, they remained, plaintively echoing: "did the world make itself? but where was it made? in what place? And if it was through the energy of God—how did it begin? Could it have been like now, when I'm being and making myself at the same time?" It's because of that lack of answers that I'm so lost.