Agua Viva Read Free Page A

the core and seed of life.
The instant is living seed.
    The secret harmony of disharmony: I don’t want something
already made but something still being tortuously made. My unbalanced words are
the wealth of my silence. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air—I
write because I so deeply want to speak. Though writing only gives me the full
measure of silence.
    And if I say “I” it’s because I dare not say “you,” or
“we” or “one.” I’m forced to the humility of personalizing myself belittling
myself but I am the are-you.
    Yes, I want the last word which is also so primary
that it gets tangled up with the unattainable part of the real. I’m still afraid
to move away from logic because I fall into instinct and directness, and into
the future: the invention of today is the only way to usher in the future. Then
it’s the future, and any hour is your allotted hour. So what’s the harm of
moving away from logic? I deal in raw materials. I’m after whatever is lurking
beyond thought. No use trying to pin me down: I simply slip away and won’t allow
it, no label will stick. I’m entering a very new and genuine chapter, curious
about itself, so appealing and personal that I can’t paint it or write it. It’s
like moments I had with you, when I would love you, moments I couldn’t go past
because I descended into their depths. It’s a state of touching the surrounding
energy and I shudder. Some mad, mad harmony. I know that my gaze must be that of
a primitive person surrendered completely to the world, primitive like the gods
who only allow the broad strokes of good and evil and don’t want to know about
good tangled up like hair in evil, evil that is good.
    I pin down sudden instants that carry within them their
own death and others are born—I pin down the instants of metamorphosis and
there’s a terrible beauty to their sequence and concurrence.
    Now day is breaking, a dawn of white mist on the sands of
the beach. Everything is mine, then. I barely touch food, I don’t want to awaken
beyond the day’s awakening. I’m growing with the day that as it grows kills in
me a certain vague hope and forces me to look the hard sun straight in the face.
The gale blows and scatters my papers. I hear that wind of cries, the death
rattle of a bird open in oblique flight. And I here impose upon myself the
severity of a taut language, I impose upon myself the nakedness of a white
skeleton free of humours. But the skeleton is free of life and while I live I
shudder all over. I won’t reach the final nakedness. And I still don’t want it,
apparently.
    This is life seen by life. I may not have meaning but it
is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has.
    I want to write to you like someone learning. I
photograph each instant. I deepen the words as if I were painting, more than an
object, its shadow. I don’t want to ask why, you can always ask why and always
get no answer—could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that
follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the
great answer for me does exist.
    And then I shall know how to paint and write, after the
strange but intimate answer. Listen to me, listen to the silence. What I say to
you is never what I say to you but something else instead. It captures the thing
that escapes me and yet I live from it and am above a shining darkness. One
instant leads me numbly to the next and the athematic theme unfurls without a
plan but geometric like the successive shapes in a kaleidoscope.
    I slowly enter my gift to myself, splendor ripped
open by the final song that seems to be the first. I enter the writing slowly as
I once entered painting. It is a world tangled up in creepers, syllables,
woodbine, colors and words—threshold of an ancestral cavern that is the womb
of the world and from it I shall be born.
    And if I often paint caves that is because they are my
plunge into the earth, dark but haloed with