The Stream of Life

  I want to paint a rose.

  The rose is the feminine flower that gives of itself all and so completely that the only joy left to it is to have given itself. Its perfume is an insane mystery. When its scent is deeply inhaled it touches the intimate depths of the heart and leaves the inside of the entire body perfumed. The way it opens into womanhood is very beautiful. The petals taste good in the mouth—all you have to do is try them. But the rose isn't it. It is she. The red ones are highly sensual. The white ones are Gods peace. It's very rare to find white roses at a florists. The yellow ones are happily alarming. The pinks are in general more fleshy and have color par excellence. The orange-colored ones are the product of grafting and are sexually attractive.

  Pay attention please: I'm inviting you to move to a new kingdom.

  Now, the carnation has an aggressiveness that comes from a certain irritability. The tips of their petals are sharp and turned up. The carnations perfume is somehow mortal. Red carnations scream in violent beauty. The white ones recall the small coffin of a dead child: the smell becomes pungent and people turn their faces away in horror. How can one transplant the carnation to canvas?

  The sunflower is the great child of the sun. So much so that it knows how to turn its enormous corolla in the direction of its creator. It doesn't matter whether it's mother or father. I don't know. Is the sunflower masculine or feminine? I think it's masculine.

  The violet is introverted and its introspection is of the deepest sort. They say it hides because it's modest. That's not it. It hides to be able to find its own secret. It's almost-not-perfume is muffled glory but it demands that people seek it out. It never ever shouts out its perfume. The violet says frivolous things that cannot be said.

  The immortelle is always dead. Its dryness tends to eternity. Its name in Greek means "golden sun."

  The daisy is a happy little flower. It's simple and skin-deep. It has just one row of petals. Its center is a child's game.

  The lovely orchid is exquisite and unfriendly. It's not spontaneous. It requires keeping under glass. But it's a splendorous woman and that cannot be denied. One also cannot deny that it's noble because it's epiphytic. Epiphytes are born on other plants without, however, taking away their nutrition. I was lying when I said it was unfriendly. I love orchids. They are born already artificial, they are born already art.

  The tulip is a tulip only in Holland. A lone tulip simply isn't. It needs an open field to be.

  The wheat flower blooms only in the center of the wheat. In its humility it has the daring to appear in diverse forms and colors. The wheat flower is Biblical. In Spanish crèches it's not separated from the shafts of wheat. It's a small heart, beating.

  But the angelica is dangerous. It has the perfume of a chapel. It bears ecstasy. It recalls the host. Many people have the urge to eat it and fill their mouths with its intense, sacred scent.

  The jasmin is for lovers. It suggests coyness. They walk hand in hand, swinging their arms, and they kiss each other softly to the aromatic almost sound of jasmin.

  Estrelicia is masculine par excellence. It has the aggressiveness of love and healthy pride. It seems to have a cock's comb and its crow. But it doesn't wait for dawn. The violence of your beauty.

  The bridal wreath has the perfume of a full moon. Its phantasmagorical and a little frightening and it's for someone who loves danger. It only comes out at night with its dizzying scent. The bridal wreath is silent. It secrets itself in deserted, shadowy corners and in the gardens of darkened houses with closed windows. It's very dangerous: it's a whistle in the dark, which nobody can stand. But I can stand it because I love danger. As for the succulent cactus flower, its large and fragrant and brilliantly colored. It's the juicy vengeance that makes a desert plant. It's splendor springing from despotic sterility.

  I'm too lazy to tell you about the edelweiss. Just that you find it at an altitude of three thousand four hundred meters. It's white and woolly. Rarely seen: it's aspiration.

  The geranium is a window-box flower. It's found in Sao Paulo, in the neighborhood of Grajaü and in Switzerland.

  The victoria regia is in the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Gardens. Enormous, almost two meters in diameter. They are aquatic flowers, they take your breath away. They are Amazonian: the dinosaurs of the flowers. They spread deep tranquility. They are majestic and simple at the same time. And even though they live on the surface of the water, they offer shade. What I'm writing you has a title in Latin: De natura florum. Later, I'll show you my study transformed into a linear design.

  The chrysanthemum is profoundly happy. It speaks through color and dishevelment. It's a flower that impetuously controls its own savagery.

  I think I'm going to have to ask permission to die. But I can't, its too late. I listened to Firebird—and passed utterly away.

  I have to interrupt this because—didn't I tell you? didn't I tell you that one day something was going to happen to me? Well, it just happened. A man named Joao just spoke to me over the phone. He grew up deep in the Amazon jungle. And he says that there's a legend there about a talking plant. It's called the tajá. And they say that when the Indians perform a magic rite on it, it actually speaks a word. João told me something that has no explanation: that one night he came home very late and as he was walking along the corridor where the plant was he heard the word, "Joao." He thought it was his mother calling him and he answered, "I'm coming." He went upstairs but he found his mother and father fast asleep.

  I'm tired. I tire easily because I'm an extremely busy person: I keep care of the world. Every day I look out from my terrace at that bit of beach and ocean and I see the thick, whiter foam and see that during the night the waters have advanced restlessly. I see this from the marks the waves leave in the sand. I look at the almond trees on my street. Before I go to sleep I take care of the world and I see if the night sky is starry and indigo blue because on certain nights, instead of black, the sky seems to be an intense indigo blue, a color I've painted on glass before. I like intensities. I take care of the boy who is nine years old and who is dressed in rags and who is extremely thin. He'll get tuberculosis, if he doesn't have it already. I become exhausted at the Botanical Gardens. I have to watch over thousands of plants and trees and especially the victoria. She's there. I watch her.

  Notice that I don't mention my emotive impressions: lucidly, I speak of some of the thousands of things and persons I take care of. And it has nothing to do with a job because I don't earn money with it. I just end up knowing what the world is like.

  Is it a lot of work to take care of the world? Yes. For example, it forces me to remember the inexpressive and therefore frightening face of the woman I saw on the street. I also watch over with my eyes the misery of those who live up above on the hillsides.

  You'll ask me why I take care of the world. It's because I was born with a mission.

  When I was a child I took care of a line of ants: they walk Indian file carrying a tiny piece of leaf. Which doesn't keep each one from communicating something to the ant coming in the opposite direction. Ants and bees are not it. They are shes.

  I read the book on bees and since then I've taken special care of the queen mother. Bees fly and deal with flowers. Is that banal? This was my own reaction. Part of the job is to note the obvious. There is, in the small ant, all of a world that escapes me if I'm not careful. For example, it has an instinctive sense of organization, a language beyond the supersonic and sexual feelings. Now I can't find a single ant to watch. They weren't all killed, that I know, or I would have heard about it.

  Taking care of the world also requires a lot of patience: I have to wait for the day an ant will appear.

  I just haven't found anyone to account to. Or have I? For I'm accounting to you right here. I'll account to you right now for that spring that was so dry. The radio bristled with static. Clothing crackled and curled with electricity from the body and the comb made your charged hair stand on end—that was a hard spring. It was exhausted from
the winter and burst out all electric. From any point you were at, you seemed to be heading into the far-off distance. Never before were there so many roadways. We spoke very little, you and I. I don't know why the world was so angry and so electrically poised. But poised for what? My body was heavy with weariness. And our big, inexpressive eyes were like the wide-open eyes of the blind. On the terrace there was the fish in the aquarium and we had a drink at that hotel bar looking out at the countryside. With the wind came goat dreaming: at the other table a solitary faun. We looked at the icy cold drink and dreamed statically inside the transparent glass. "What was that you said?" you asked. "I didn't say anything." Days and more days went by and everything in that danger and the geraniums so bright red. One instant of tuning in was enough to get the barbed static of spring in the wind all over again: the shameless goat dream and the fish all empty and our sudden urge to steal fruit. The faun crowned now in solitary leaps. "What?" "I didn't say anything." But I noticed an initial rustle, like a heart beating under the earth. I quietly placed my ear to the ground and heard the summer open up a roadway deep inside the earth and my heart under the earth—"nothing, I didn't say anything!"—and I felt the patient brutality with which the closed earth opened inside, giving birth, and I knew the sweet heaviness with which the summer was ripening a hundred thousand oranges and I knew the oranges were mine. Because I was in love.

  I pride myself on always being able to sense a change in the weather. There's something in the air—your body warns you that something new is coming and I become agitated through and through. I don't know for what. During that same spring I was given a plant called a primrose. It's so mysterious that in its mystery it contains what is inexplicable in nature. Apparently there's nothing unusual about it. But precisely on the first day of spring the leaves die and in their place closed flowers are born that have a feminine and masculine perfume that is extremely intoxicating. People are sitting close by and looking absent- mindedly. And see, they are slowly opening and surrendering themselves to the new season right under our astonished gaze: it's spring settling in.

  But when winter comes I give and give and give. I bundle myself up. I cradle broods of people to my warm breast. And you hear the noise of someone having hot soup. I'm experiencing rainy days now: the time for me to give is close at hand.

  Don't you see that this is like a child being born? It hurts. Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming- into-being is a slow, slow, good pain. It's a full stretching to the point where the person can stretch no more. And the blood is thankful. I breathe, I breathe. The air is it. Air with wind is already a he or a she. If I had to force myself to write to you I would become very sad. Sometimes I can't stand the force of inspiration. Then I paint oppressed. It's very good that things don't depend on me.

  I've talked a lot about death. But I'm going to tell you about the breath of life. When a person has stopped breathing he's given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: one mouth glues itself onto the mouth of another and breaths. And then the other begins to breathe again. This exchange of breath is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard tell about life. Truthfully, the beauty of this mouth-to-mouth is overwhelming to me.

  Oh, how uncertain everything is. And yet its within the Order. I don't even know what I'm going to write you in my next sentence. People never speak the ultimate truth. Whoever knows the truth, step forward. And speak. Contrite, we'll listen.

  ... I noticed him suddenly and he was so extraordinarily beautiful and virile a man that I felt a joy of creation. It's not that I wanted him for myself, just as I don't want for myself the little boy with the hair of an archangel I saw running after the ball. I just wanted to look. The man looked at me for an instant and smiled calmly: he knew how beautiful he was and I know that he knew I didn't want him for myself. He smiled because he didn't feel at all threatened. It's just that beings who are exceptional in any sense are subject to more danger than normal people. I crossed the street and hailed a cab. The breeze ruffled the hairs on the back of my neck. And I was so happy that I curled up out of fear in a corner of the cab, because happiness hurts. And all this caused by the sight of a beautiful man. I continued not to want him for myself—what I like are people who are a little ugly and at the same time in harmony, but in a certain way he'd given me a lot with that smile of complicity between people who understand each other. I didn't understand any of that.

  The courage to live: I leave hidden what needs to be hidden and what needs to spread out in secret.

  I fall silent.

  Because I don't know what my secret is. Tell me yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us. It's not a defamatory secret. It's simply that: secret.

  And there are no formulas for it.

  I think that now I'll have to ask permission to die a little. Excuse me, will you? I won't be long. Thanks.

  . . . No. I couldn't die. Will I end here this "thing- word" by my own voluntary act? Not yet.

  I'm transfiguring reality—what is it that escapes me? why don't I stretch out my hand and grab? It's because I've only dreamed the world but have never seen it.

  What I'm writing you is in contralto. It's a negro spiritual. It has a chorus and lighted candles. I'm feeling dizzy now. I'm a little frightened. To what end will my freedom lead me? What is this I'm writing you? It leaves me alone. But I go on and pray and my freedom is ruled by the Order—I'm no longer afraid. What guides me is simply a sense of discovery. Behind what's behind thinking.

  What I really do when I write you is follow myself, and I'm doing it right now: I'm following myself without knowing what it will lead me to. Sometimes following myself is so hard. Because of following something that's still so nebulous. Sometimes I end up stopping.

  Now I'm frightened. Because I'm going to tell you something. Wait for the fear to pass.

  It passed. It's the following: to me, dissonance is harmony. Melody often bores me. So does the so-called leitmotif. What I want in music and in what I write you and in what I paint are geometrical lines that cross in space and form a discordance that I can understand. It's pure it. My being becomes completely soaked and slightly intoxicated. What I'm telling you is very important. And I work while I'm asleep: because it's then that I move in the mystery.

  It's Sunday morning. On this Sunday of sun and Jupiter I'm alone at home. Suddenly, I've split in two and doubled over, as with an intense labor pain—and I saw that the girl in me was dying. I shall never forget this bloody Sunday. To heal will take time. And here I am, hard and silent and heroic. Without a little girl inside me. All lives are heroic lives.

  Creation escapes me. And I don't even want to know so much. I'm satisfied that my heart beats in my chest. I'm satisfied with the impersonal vitality of the it.

  Right now I feel my heart beating wildly in my chest. It's a vindication because during the last few sentences I was thinking only on the surface of myself. So the core of existence comes forth to bathe and erase all traces of thought. The sea erases the wave marks in the sand. Oh God, how happy I'm being. What destroys happiness is fear.

  I'm still afraid. But my heart is beating. Inexplicable love makes the heart beat faster. The only guarantee is that I was born. You are a way of my being me, and I a way of you being you: hence the limits of my possibility.

  I'm in a joy that one can die from. Sweet exhaustion in talking to you. But there's hope. My hope is to feel voracious toward the future. One day you said you loved me. I pretend to believe and live, from yesterday to today, in happy love. But to remember with yearning is like saying good-bye again.

  A fantastic world surrounds me and is me. I hear the wild song of a bird and I crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit gnawed by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse. A dissonant swarm of insects surrounds me, light of a burning lamp that I am. I exceed myself then in order to be. I'm in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What fever: I can't stop living. In this dense jungle of words that wrap themselves thickly around what I
feel and think and experience and that transform all that I am into something of my own that nonetheless remains entirely separate from me. I watch myself think. What I ask myself is this: who is it in me that remains outside even of thinking? I'm writing you all of this since it's a challenge I'm forced to accept with humility. I'm startled by my ghosts, by what is mythical and fantastic—life is supernatural. And I walk on a loose rope to the end of my dream. Visceras tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of the impulses. Before organizing myself, I have to disorganize myself internally. To experience the first, fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to make mistakes, to fall and get up again.

  But if I wait for understanding to accept things—the act of surrender will never take place. I have to take the plunge all at once, the plunge that embraces comprehension and above all incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is give myself over. How do I do that? I know, though, that only in walking does one learn how to walk and then—miracle—one walks.

  I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of myself is when I know nothing and manufacture I don't know what.

  Behold, suddenly I see that I know nothing. Is the blade of my knife growing dull? It seems to me the most likely thing is that I don't understand because what I see now is so hard: and I'm cunningly entering into contact with a reality that is new to me and doesn't yet have thoughts corresponding to it, and much less a word that names it. It's one more sensation behind thought.

  How can I explain this to you? I'm going to try. It's that I'm perceiving a slanted reality. One seen through an oblique slice. Only now have I intuited the obliqueness of life. Before I saw only through straight and parallel slices. I didn't notice the artful, slanted trace. Now I divine that life