A Breath of Life Read Free

It’s this: ?
    Could I be betraying myself? Could I be altering the course of a river? I must trust that abundant river. Or maybe I’m damming a river? I try to open the flood-gates, I want to watch the water gushing out. I want every sentence of this book to be a climax.
    I must be patient for the fruits will be surprising.
    This is a quiet book. And it speaks, it speaks softly.
    This is a fresh book — recently emerged from nothingness. It is played delicately and confidently on the piano and every note is clean and perfect, each distinct from the others. This book is a carrier pigeon. I write for nothing and for no one. Anyone who reads me does so at his own risk. I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time. The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive. I lost sight of myself so long ago that I’m hesitant to try to find myself. I’m afraid to begin. Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations. I’m so afraid to be me. I’m so dangerous. They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.
    I feel as though I’m still not writing. I foresee and want a way of speaking that’s more fanciful, more precise, with more rapture, making spirals in the air.
    Each new book is a journey. But a journey with eyes covered thro’ seas never before discovered — the muzzle on the eyes, the terror of the dark is total. When I feel an inspiration, I die of fear because I know that once again I’ll be traveling alone in a world that repels me. But my characters are not to blame and I treat them as best I can. They arrive from nowhere. They are inspiration. Inspiration is not madness. It’s God. My problem is the fear of going mad. I have to control myself. There are laws that govern communication. Impersonality is one condition. Separativity and ignorance are sin in a general sense. And madness is the temptation to be totally power. My limitations are the raw material to be worked as long as I don’t reach my objective.
    I live in the living flesh, that’s why I make such an effort to give thick skin to my characters. But I can’t stand it and make them cry for no reason.
    Self-moving roots that are not planted or the root of a tooth? For I too cast off my chains: I kill what disturbs me and good and evil disturb me and I head definitively to encounter a world that is inside me, I who write to free myself from the difficult burden of a person being himself.
    In every word a heart beats. Writing is that search for the intimate truth of life. Life that disturbs me and leaves my own trembling heart suffering the incalculable pain that seems necessary for my maturity — maturity? I’ve lived this long without it!
    Yes. But it seems the time has come to fully accept the mysterious life of those who one day shall die. I must begin by accepting myself and not feeling the punitive horror of every time I fall, for when I fall the human race inside me falls too. To accept myself fully? that is a violation of my very life. Every change, every new project is scary: my heart is scared. And that is why each word of mine has a heart where blood flows.
    Everything I’m writing here is forged in my silence and in shadows. I see little, I hear almost nothing. I finally dive into myself down to the birthplace of the spirit that inhabits me. My source is obscure. I’m writing because I don’t know what to do with myself. I mean: I don’t know what to do with my spirit. The body tells a lot. But I don’t know the laws of the spirit: it wanders. My thought, with the enunciation of the words mentally blossoming, without my saying or writing anything afterwards — this thought of mine in words is preceded by an instantaneous vision, without words, of the thought — the word that follows, almost immediately — a spatial difference of less than a millimeter. Before thinking, then, I’ve already thought. I suppose that the composer of a symphony only has the “thought before the thought,” is what can be