Agua Viva Read Free

of the instant. And in the instant is the
is
of the
instant. I want to seize my
is
. And like a bird I sing hallelujah into
the air. And my song belongs to no one. But no passion suffered in pain and love
is not followed by a hallelujah.
    Is my theme the instant? the theme of my life. I try to
keep up with it, I divide thousands of times into as many times as the number of
instants running by, fragmented as I am and the moments so fragile—my only vow
is to life born with time and growing along with it: only in time itself is
there room enough for me.
    All of me is writing to you and I feel the taste of being
and the taste-of-you is as abstract as the instant. I also use my whole body
when I paint and set the bodiless upon the canvas, my whole body wrestling with
myself. You don’t understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole
body. When you come to read me you will ask why I don’t keep to painting and my
exhibitions, since I write so rough and disorderly. It’s because now I feel the
need for words—and what I’m writing is new to me because until now my true
word has never been touched. The word is my fourth dimension.
    Today I finished the canvas I told you about: curves that
intersect in fine black lines, and you, with your habit of wanting to know why—
I’m not interested in that, the cause is past matter—will ask me why the fine
black lines? because of the same secret that now makes me write as if to you,
writing something round and rolled up and warm, but sometimes cold as the fresh
instants, the water of an ever-trembling stream. Can what I painted on this
canvas be put into words? Just as the silent word can be suggested by a musical
sound.
    I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music—I
gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves
through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the
last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.
    And so I realize that I want the vibrating substratum of
the repeated word sung in Gregorian chant. I’m aware that I can’t say everything
I know, I only know when painting or pronouncing, syllables blind of meaning.
And if here I must use words, they must bear an almost merely bodily meaning.
I’m struggling with the last vibration. To tell you of my substratum I make a
sentence of words made only from instants-now. Read, therefore, my invention as
pure vibration with no meaning beyond each whistling syllable, read this: “with
the passing of the centuries I lost the secret of Egypt, when I moved in
longitudes, latitudes, and altitudes with the energetic action of electrons,
protons, and neutrons, under the spell of the word and its shadow.” What I wrote
you here is an electronic drawing without past or future: it is simply now.
    I must also write to you because you harvest
discursive words and not the directness of my painting. I know that my phrases
are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their
faults, but too much love is bad for the work. This isn’t a book because this
isn’t how anyone writes. Is what I write a single climax? My days are a single
climax: I live on the edge.
    In writing I can’t manufacture something as in painting,
when I use my craft to mix a color. But I’m trying to write to you with my whole
body, loosing an arrow that will sink into the tender and neuralgic centre of
the word. My secret body tells you: dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and plesiosaurs,
meaning nothing but their sound, though this doesn’t dry them out like straw but
moistens them instead. I don’t paint ideas, I paint the unattainable “forever.”
Or “for never,” it amounts to the same. More than anything else, I paint
painting. And more than anything else, I write you hard writing. I want to grab
the word in my hand. Is the word an object? And from the instants I extract the
juice of their fruits. I must deprive myself to reach