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.
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 contractin
g 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 viole
nt 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.